“Get out of here!” I heard my father shout. If he had been the one shot, he at least had enough life left to instruct me to run.
My heart pounded in my chest, my ears, my eyes, it felt. I scrambled to get away from Olena’s death grip. I yanked my arm free and threw it back to slam my elbow into her beak of a nose. I felt the bone crack against the hard point of my bent arm. She screamed and threw her hands over a sudden gush of blood. I sucked in a breath, ready to escape, and made it half a step before I slammed into a brick wall of a body.
The henchman hooked an arm around me, and before I could blink, he was squeezing the air from my throat and jamming his gun into my temple.
The entire room froze, and my life teetered on the brink.
I blinked, already getting dizzy from lack of oxygen, and saw the waiter, who was apparently an FBI agent, on the floor. A wave of relief hit me because the gunshot from earlier had not struck my father. I wondered if the man was dead.
“Don’t move,” the henchman pointing the gun to my head said.
My father aimed his weapon at us. His jaw clenched and his eyes were black pits. I saw a slight twitch in his lip and a fraction of a shake in his hands. To anyone else, it would have been invisible, but I knew all his tells. He was nervous, and it terrified me.
“Dad,” I whispered.
“Shut up!” the henchman barked and tightened his grip on my throat. The gun pushed into my temple like a screwdriver. I squeezed my eyes shut in terror.
Olena croaked something from the floor, her bloody hand muffling the sound of her voice. The man gripping me glanced down at her, and another gunshot rang out. It split my hearing in half, deafening me to everything but a mind-shattering ringing.
I screamed and it took a few seconds to realize my ability to scream was a result of the vise around my neck having gone slack.
The enormous henchman swayed against me, his weight threatening to collapse and take me down with him.
I spun in his arm still loosely hooked around me and found myself face first into his bloody chest.
Another scream ripped from my mouth as I shoved him away. My palms were blood soaked and my legs like rubber. Before I could gather my thoughts, another gunshot tore through the room.
I heard my father cry out in pain, and I feared the worst.
“Dad!”
He’d been shot in the leg and had fallen to one knee. His face twisted in pain. He gripped the dining table with a sweaty hand and used his other to wave me away. The FBI agent in the living room was not dead. He’d sat up and landed a successful shot. He was preparing to take another.
“Get out of here!” my father screamed at me. The pain fromthe gunshot looked excruciating, but not as painful as the fear in his eyes that something would happen to me.
“Dad, I can’t!” I cried. I couldn’t leave him. A warped sense of loyalty wouldn’t let me.
The henchman was dead from the bullet my father had fired, I knew it. Olena was nursing her broken nose, swearing in another language and spitting blood, and the agent was preparing to do more damage.
I rounded the table to get to my father. His leg was pouring blood. He’d been hit in his left calf. The wounded limb lay out behind him like a useless log. I knew I couldn’t lift him, especially not with someone actively shooting at us. The best I could do would be to drag him to the door.
He held out a hand to stop me approaching and gave me a look that was at once pleading and a command. “Stop. You have to get out of here.”
“Dad, I’m not—”
“Erin,go!”
The sound of my name stopped me in my tracks. He never broke character. Ever. The significance of it was too much to ignore.
“Go,” he said again, and I had no choice but to obey.
I pivoted on my toe before the agent rose and got off another shot. I hurtled myself toward the door, not knowing what to expect on the other side. It wasn’t until I was in the hall eyeing the glowing green EXITsign that I heard a voice command me to stop. I threw myself into the stairwell and ran down as fast as I could. My lungs were on fire and my heart about to beat out of my chest when I reached the ground floor and yanked open a service door. I found myself on a side street in the pouring rain.
I ran into the night, getting soaked, until a sturdy voice commanded me to stop, this time from in front of me and with a gun barrel aimed at me for emphasis.
Cornered, I splashed to a stop, my body drenched, and my toes numb in my strappy shoes. I hadn’t noticed the blood on my hands until I raised them, and it began to wash off in the rain.
The man pointing his gun at me had FBI in block letters on his coat slicked with rain.
